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As he so brilliantly demonstrated in The High and the Mighty and Fate Is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann has a unique ability to evoke the sense of lofty adventure, the mysterious exhilaration of spirit that is inherent in the very act of flight. It is his special gift to unshackle the earthbound reader, to release us from our daily humdrum - until w... more »e discover ourselves soaring in the company of eagles. Now in this, his finest novel, that gift is supremely manifest. The time is 1917. It is the eve of an appalling disaster - as General Nivelle and his poilus, desperate to expel the invader from their homeland, are about to hurl themselves at the impregnable Hindenburg line. High above the bloodsoaked fields of France, fighting with equal desperation, flies a breed of young men who are either quick or soon dead. They are the airmen of the Royal Flying Corps, of the Imperial German Air Force, of the French Air Service - knights of the sky, last heirs of the chivalric tradition, dueling in their fragile flying machines living with abandon, dying with glory. Gann takes us aloft with them - with the young Frenchman bearing the ancient name of Chamay, who has dedicated himself to personal vengeance, and with the veteran German ace Kupper, tormented by a love for his Vaterland and a loathing for legalized slaughter. It is the duel between these two brave men that is at the heart of the novel. From the opening pages to the final, climactic confrontation, the tension eases only when, for brief moments, we alight on earth. And even then there stands in wait the ominous figure of Pilger, the German private who is Kupper's batman, the clumsy, insensitive, cunning product of an education for death on the Eastern front - the symbol of the beast that war can make of man. In the Company of Eagles moves us with its counterpointing of the noblest and the basest actions to which men can be stirred by momentous events. Here, on a great scorched and bloody canvas, Ernest K. Gann has re-created the drama of mankind engaged in its first self-made mass calamity - its tragedy , its humor, its horror, and its heartrending gallantry.« less